The convective heat transfer characteristics under a normally synthetic jet impingement driven by a piston actuator are investigated experimentally in the present study. Particular attentions are paid to present the detailed local and laterally-averaged heat transfer comparison between synthetic jet and continuous jet, as well as the effect of orifice shape on the synthetic jet impingement. Three jet orifices including single-round, single-square, and single-rectangular are designed to have the approximately same exit area. In additional, heat transfer regimes for the synthetic jet impingement in the situation of large stroke length to jet-to-surface spacing are further identified. In the present, the equivalent convective heat transfer coefficient is defined in terms of the difference between target temperature and ambient temperature. The results show that continuous jet exhibits stronger local heat transfer than the synthetic jet in the vicinity of stagnation point. However, the synthetic jet produces much flatter and more uniform local heat transfer coefficient distributions over the surface, showing its advantage over the continuous jet on laterally-averaged convective heat transfer enhancement at a larger jet-to-surface spacing. For the piston-driven synthetic jet featured by low excitation frequency and large stroke length, there is evidence for a power law relationship between stagnation Nusselt number and jet Reynolds number with an exponent of approximately 0.32. Two kinds of heat transfer regimes are observed and a critical ratio of stroke length to jet-to-surface spacing is identified as 18 approximately regardless of orifice shape. The orifice shape has a moderate effect on the convective heat transfer. The single-rectangular synthetic jet produces a slightly better stagnation point heat transfer than the other orifices. The synthetic jet originated from the round-hole orifice seems to introduce favorable overall convective heat transfer achievement. The advantage of synthetic jet impingement in comparison to the corresponding continuous jet is relatively degraded for the square-hole orifice. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.